Friday, February 12, 2010

The latest xkcd is so fucking awful that I having trouble trying to find to words to express my disgust. Every time I think about this putrescent mass of self-aggrandizing anal fist-fuckery, my brain shits all over itself in horror and I have to fight to prevent myself from typing "COCKSHITFUCKBALLS" over and over again while slamming my face against the keyboard in rage.

Nevertheless, I'm gonna give it a shot, because I wouldn't want to let you assholes down.

Where to fucking begin?

Randall, if you're going to write something that's supposed to be the text of a letter, make it at least sound like something a human being who has had any contact with the rest of the fucking human race at least once in their life. The text of this supposed "letter" is so stilted that, were anyone to ever actually receive it, they would vomit all over themselves and then die, just so they wouldn't have to finish reading the letter. It's a good thing the "character" (who is totally not Randall projecting his own romantic inadequacies onto a shitty stick figure he drew (except that that's exactly what he is doing)) in this comic wants the relationship to end, because any girl who gets this letter is going to break up with him anyway, and then killthemselves.

Also, this is fucking insulting to scientists. The second to last panel implies that scientists can never be cute and funny. Worse, because it is specifically talking about graphs, Randall is implying that graphs can't be funny. Randall - you are a hypocritical, shit-eating motherfucker. If graphs aren't funny, then why have you been trying to make jokes about them for the past 6 years? Is this a way to excuse any of your past graph jokes that weren't funny? Are you trying to pander to the socially inept, self-diagnosed Aspies of the web, giving them an out when their "humor" falls flat - "I'm sorry it isn't funny - I'm a scientist"? What are you fucking doing, Randy? WHAT ARE YOU FUCKING DOING!?

I am...I just...What is this, I don't even...

Randall. Randall. I can't find the words to explain to you how fucking godawful this...this thing you've created is. It's a muddled message of smug self-certainty wrapped up in a turgid sense of forced sincerity fried in a batter of bitter emo tears served up with shitty writing dipping sauce.

Fuck.

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[hey poore, way to include a friggin post title with your post. I had to go back and make one up for you --Carl]

Posted by
David Poore

78 comments:

i think the first line's very revealing.shows the difference between what was xkcd and what is.

"i wanted to make a science valentine", i.e. i consciously intended to invoke sciencey-ness for the purposes of appealing to someone.not like way back when, which seemed more "this is how i think, this is what happens to me, hey oh it happens to be all sciencey".

I actually liked this which was is a change, maybe because I saw it as irony on what his comic has become. It seemed like it was making fun of the cliche's that appear over and over again in xkcd. Maybe Monroe wasn't being self deprecating in this, maybe it is his soul talking to him telling him his comic is for the most part shit now, either way, I got enjoyment out of it viewing this comic from that lens of self deprecation.

well obviously the text is supposed to sound like an ACTUAL letter. That is one of the few things that bother me about this site- you say the wording/dialogue isn't realistic enough when it's never really supposed to be because ,um, it's a comic. If comics were that realistic they'd be boring.

well who cares it's a piece of shit anyway and it tried to sound poetic and failed blah blah i hate this emo shit comic AAARGH

It's not realistic text. It's not interesting text. It doesn't flow, it's not funny, it's just bad. It's not unrealistic in the sense that it has tons of bon mots, it's not unrealistic because nobody would ever be quite that clever. It's awful text.

When your text is howlingly, screamingly unrealistic, it should at least be so for a reason. Randall's reason is mostly "because he can't write dialogue that isn't screamingly awful."

I'm pretty sure it's not saying that graphs can't be cute and funny. In face, I'm pretty sure it's saying THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF THAT. He's saying that graphs can be cute and funny, and he is asking himself "Do I just make these graphs because they are cute and funny?"

Now, how cute and funny his graphs are is definitely up for debate, but it seems pretty damn clear to me that he is saying that although graphs can be cute and funny, a REAL SCIENTIST (which he isn't, but for some reason he got it into his head that he is) wouldn't make them just because they are cute and funny, but would actually care about the data and what it means.

It was mentioned in the last post, but the xkcdexplained for today's comic is brilliant.

I'm inclined to believe it because seriously, there's no way Randall could be a scientist. In high school you'd get points marked off for making graphs without the axes labeled. Shouldn't he be BETTER than high school math?

I can make out that the x-axis is probably supposed to be "time" but what the hell is the y-axis supposed to be? I don't get the graph, I mean I'm the guy who also didn't get the Two-Face reference in the last one so I admit I am pretty dense but this graph makes no sense to me.

Obviously the two lines are happiness and... love? I guess if you'd kept some sort of journal you could go back and determine how many days you seemingly enjoyed, but what? "I loved her this much that month, this much that month, and this much that month"? And you had to graph it why, then?

Nice, Randall made you cry, you and the whole xkcdsucks community :'). See ? Science, it works, bitches !

You guys are so fucked up by all the horse shit Carl & Co. poured inside you that you don't even know how to react, you just line up swear words (yup, just like I did right now, imitating their style.) and nothing else.

You all feel completely destroyed by that comic, and think that you're going to exorcise it by just group-masturbating about how bad you think it is. BTW, for the (lots of) ones of you who think it actually works, rest assured it doesn't. Now who wants to talk about humanness ?

"It's not realistic text. It's not interesting text. It doesn't flow, it's not funny, it's just bad. It's not unrealistic in the sense that it has tons of bon mots, it's not unrealistic because nobody would ever be quite that clever. It's awful text."

Ah, but it is realistic. The writer of the text is Randall. If Randall ever did write a smug, whiny, graph-based breakup letter, then he would write one just as awfully composed as the one in the comic.

Hmm, sorry if I'm making that discussion opaque. Apart from meaning "the human race", I thought it was supposed to mean "the traits of character that make somebody human in its behaviour". You know, like in "Nazi ain't got no humanity" (Godwin's law doesn't apply, quoted from Inglourious Basterds).

I like when trolls are like Taust. They're so dumb they're incomprehensible. It's like he's just spewing a string of catch phrases strung together by schizophasia. It's so masterfully stupid I don't even care if it's a troll or a legitimately idiotic person--if it's a troll, we're witnessing the work of an artist who specializes in mind-numbing stupidity. If it's a legitimate idiot, we're witnessing one of the single dumbest examples of humanity on the planet.

The best part, though, are the bits of its shattered mind that manage to come through the word salad--those little bits that seem to make sense, if they weren't ideas too imbecilic for a human to entertain. Surely he doesn't mean that. It's easier to imagine that he simply has no grasp of how to use words to communicate with other humans than to believe that he believes the fragmented ideas he's vomited onto the screen. And that, my friend, is a rare gift.

I couldn't have expressed my opinion of this comic quite as elegantly- but the thing that gets me most about the comic, is that randall claims he is a scientist.

Randall. you may have Been a 'scientist' at some point, but now, you Ship T shirts to Teenagers. That does not make you a scientist.

You are NOT a Scientist.

I fust finished the week spending a six hour straight in a lab examining, testing quantifying nonlinear optical behaviour; and the claim that you still consider yourself a scientist because you defecate out a comic with a graph is abberant and fraudulent.

Reading these comics is like watching as a teenage boy digs up the graves of stillborn babies, fills their bodies with the organs of rats and stray dogs, and pickles the resultant monstrostiy. He then claims to be a 'mother'. "I made a baby didn't I?"

I love insulting foreigners who bastardize the English language because then they get all indignant about it. Maybe you should learn to speak the language before you try to speak the language? Because what you just wrote was not English except in the sense that it contained English words; it was word salad. It had no actual meaning. It expressed only concepts that were so batshit stupid I was forced to conclude that you didn't know how to express concepts in English.

You'll have to forgive me for expecting people who attempt to communicate with me to know how to communicate with me. It's a little habit I picked up in "basic human interactions:" if you do not understand the language well enough to elucidate concepts in a fashion where they actually make sense (and this applies to writing about fields in which you are not well-versed), you fucking don't attempt to write about them. Like, it's pretty clear you have at best a passing familiarity with English, and here you are attempting to mock people who you can barely even comprehend. You don't even know what the fuck we're saying. And yet here you are acting smug because you think your rudimentary grasp has granted you understanding, flinging nonsensical insults at people whose language gives you nothing more than a fleeting grasp of what they're trying to express--and even if you grasp the concepts you certainly have no way to express them.

Do you know what this makes you? I will tell you! It makes you an idiot. Come back when you speak the language well enough to articulate a concept, and then maybe we'll talk. Until then you're a presumptuous fool and have no business attempting to have conversations which deal with the nuance of the language.

All right then, let's try and have a decent arguing. Apart from all the subtle and delicate pieces of advice you gave me about my english (which, by the way, is doing fine enough), what was your last point before we slipped into linguistical concerns ?

This blog has turned into a contest of who is able to use the most sophisticated swear language so all the other kids can sit and praise his insult-xkcd-skills (possibly while touching themselves sexually. Perhaps.)

Sure, xkcd sucks (99% of the time, whatever). This lame-ass criticism sucks just as hard, if not harder, though.

You know, it's weird. I've known Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Finns, Croats, Japanese, Koreans, and Australians who speak almost perfect idiomatic English and only very occasionally make any mistakes that a native speaker wouldn't make. But I have yet to meet a single Francophone that didn't make at least one egregious error with every English sentence they spoke. What's the deal? Is it out of some misplaced assumption that French is still something all educated people learn? Is it some deep-seated hatred of the English left over from their long rivalry? Are all Frenchies just lazy and stupid?

Can I be a party-pooper? I think the critique was lackluster today. I KNOW that comics like this truly redefine our concepts of "bad", and it's hard to truly grasp EVERYTHING it does wrong. But there is SO much wrong with this comic that it certainly deserves much more than that. Those complaints and curses barely scratch the surface at all.

As has been said above, one of the insults is that Randall is using the comic to display himself as a self-appointed "SCIENTIST". Yeah, I can already see the fanboys saying that it's a COMIC, it's not actually Randall. Fuck you. Anyone with half a brain knows that xkcd is purely a Gary Stu (i.e. idealised self-insertion) webcomic. So, fuck you.

Also, not only is this comic an insult to science, but it uses that insulting "science" to make an emo "oww love sucks" comic, which Randall is TERRIBLE at making. It's like painting a target in your groin before shooting you with a sawed-off shotgun.

The comic certainly wasn't funny and if it was supposed to evoke sadness or something... This was just another stick figure to which the reader is not attached as he(?) has no definite history or other reason for empathy.

I <3 xkcdsucks, guys, but when you do a comic critique, um... actually do a critique? Not just a "HOLY FUCK I DON'T KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN CUZ THIS IS SO BAD". Otherwise, it's kindof a pointless blog post, y'know?

I hate it when you guys complain about "unrealistic text." FUCK YOU ALL, why does the webcomic need realistic text? Does it even remotely add to the humor? Also some situations are so hard to put in realistic text yet make it fit in a panel.look how much room he has to draw a good pictures yet put descriptive text onto one panel.

The text is dispassionate but passable. Not stilted at all, although it is split into different chunks across the panels, so I can see why that would be confusing for you.

Second to last panel does not imply that scientists cannot be cute or funny. Half the joke is how completely anal the guy is. It's not a joke if that's normal scientist behaviour. Similarly, the final panel is funny /by contrast/ to the silly one in the first panel. Nothing implies graphs are inherently unfunny. In fact, the presence of one that's meant to be cute and funny implies the exact opposite, so you just essentially wasted about a paragraph violently shitting your brains out of your arse, when you could have been getting on with your life. Could've baked a cake or shoplifted some crayons in the time it took you to write that.

XKCD sucks. Yes. But you're a much bigger tit than Randy. Bring back the regular guy.

I'm with Skullthumper on this one. Rabid rants over trivial things stopped being hilarious to me when I was 16. Where was the SOUL, man? I wanna know that you loathed this comic as much as I do, but...it just felt forced.

Taust - I'm not the kind of guy who will jump on someone for grammatical mistakes, but your little reply in French? You are an absolute tool. Hur hur hur, we're dumb Americans. I got it. Drive on, Turbo.

It's funny cus you've never had, or never will have a valentine, so you're taking your anger out on the internet. This shows that you have small balls, and can only talk about people using electricity...

"It's funny cus you've never had, or never will have a valentine, so you're taking your anger out on the internet. This shows that you have small balls, and can only talk about people using electricity..."

um I kinda doubt Randall reads the comments here, if you want to talk to him you might have better luck on the XKCD forums.

Thanks for being a jerk, fred. Listen, I hated this comic as much as everyone else. I know Randall fails miserably at writing dialogue. All I was trying to say was that he probably wasn't aiming at realistic dialogue this time, because hewas trying to sound a bit more poetic and emo. That doesn't mean this wasn't a piece of shit, I was just saying that one thing and you misinterpreted it.

The current comic, like many recently, leaves me thinking "yes, that is accurate." I'd go so far as to say that XKCD was my favorite comic like that, but http://thisisindexed.com/ is actually very amusing a lot of the time, so XKCD doesn't even get that.

Shitty fucking "comic" is fucking shitty.I fucking hated this one so much.I fucking click on the new one for Monday, and now I'm raging.

Utter shit followed by a fucking POSTER.

Here's my Valentine's Day card to Randall:

Jesus fucking shit juice get a fucking job you fucking hack. Stop projecting your shitty feelings onto a shitty, faceless stick figure of yourself as if you're fucking special for being a nerd who doesn't actually know anything about the fields you find interesting.

You spend your fucking life browsing the internet and when you find an interesting Wikipeida article you make a comic around the fucking term, insert your faceless (because you can't come to terms with your own fucking identity in real life) shit figure, and then mention the wikipedia term in the alt text to get people to look it up.

You're unoriginal, uncreative, and a fucking attention whore. You have feelings that you don't understand and can't cope with in a normal manner so you throw them into shitty fucking comics. That's not creativity - that's mental illness.

You're out of college and you're still doing nothing with your life and you are not a master of the shit you studied. You can't segue that into a fucking webcomic and have anyone believe that's the path you fucking chose. You had grandiose expectations for yourself (because you're so fucking full of yourself) and when you failed to meet those expectations you decided to try and take a more "creative" route to save face. Yet you won't even fucking show your face because you're so ashamed of and disappointed in yourself for being a complete failure at what you originally set out to do.

(Whenever xkcd amuses me now I think of xckd sucks and think "surely Carl cannot dislike this one, what is there to complain about?" Usually, however, he finds something, or if he doesn't, someone else here will.)

The whole paragraph starting with "Also, this is fucking insulting to scientists" is just flat-out dumb. An asinine reading of the comic.

I know Randal frequently (frequently!) doesn't write clearly enough to be understood, but this was not one of those times. Nowhere does he imply that scientists can't be cute and funny. And he certainly does not imply that graphs can't be cute and funny.

No. He says "Do I make graphs because they are cute and funny? Or am I a scientist?"

To break it down: should I make a cute and funny graph representing our relationship (leaving aside the real data), or should I be a scientist plot the actual data, which says our relationship has gone down hill?

So, leving aside your inability to comprehend a for-once fairly understandable couple of sentences, you appear to be left with only one critique in your "critique:" the letter writing sucked.

Well, maybe it did. But if you're going to get into a blind rage over this comic, you should be able to give a better reason than "the letter writing sucked."

"because any girl who gets this letter is going to break up with him anyway, and then killthemselves."

is unacceptable. If you know you're talking about a girl, she's going to kill HERself. I'm down with using "their" when gender is unknown, but you wouldn't say "she's going to kill themselves", would you?

This comic was "eh", but you're making some erroneous readings. He's arguing that chart making and graphs should only be made when they're funny AND scientific. (And of course, we don't have to assume that this character represents Randall, or even his full sentiments).

Now, of course, the problem is that prior graphs Randall has put up are neither funny nor particularly well researched or illuminated. Google search ones come to mind.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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